Archive for PR Resources

Does your public relations plan include a strategy for influencers? Read today’s guest post to learn about Influencer Marketing and why it’s becoming a PR essential.

While blogs and influencers don’t currently get a large portion of a brand’s digital spend, they rank incredibly high with customers for popularity, trust, and influence. Brands and PR professionals are starting to catch on and are increasing their spend on influence marketing in 2015.

An “influencer” can take on many different forms: an influential mommy blogger; a fashionista on Instagram; a foodie with beautiful food boards on Pinterest; and the list goes on.

Read on to learn more about influencer marketing and how you can add it to your brand or client’s arsenal ASAP.

Getting more exposure and publicity for your business is great, but not at the expense of your privacy. This guest post from Michelle Peterman shows you how to protect your private life.

Even if your business is you, it is important to keep your private life private. There is only so much you want someone you’ve never met to find out about you, right?

We’ve talked on this site before about protecting your reputation and in our post, “Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation,” we gave you a list of web tools you can use to keep an eye on what people are saying and writing about you online.

In this post we’re going to teach you how to protect your personal reputation and keep it separate from your public persona. Read More→

The public relations industry is changing rapidly. Unfortunately, it looks like PR education is not adapting as fast. In today’s guest post by Ed Zitron, he talks about what students of PR really need to learn to succeed.

In 2005, I took a public relations course at a major state university – PR 101 – and remember the lesson plans clearly:

the history of PR

writing a “communications brief”

writing a press release

press conferences

Eventually, I moved on to further classes. They mostly covered press conferences and “advance communications,” a vague summary of different techniques that you might want to use in general PR… activities.

At no point did the courses actually address the media.

This was nearly a full year before Twitter would launch. Facebook wasn’t available outside of colleges. Jon Gruber had been writing for 3 years, and TechCrunch would launch not too long after. Thus we completely missed a chunk of the “social” aspect that makes up the new world of PR, or indeed the importance of bloggers.

Regardless, reading over current PR courses and many textbooks used in courses, it’s clear PR undergrads are being taught to do things that are not part of most PR people’s days. Yes, it’s very exciting to be taught that you’ll be handling big campaigns, or “handling webinars,” or how important AP Style is (which in the grand scheme of things is mostly irrelevant), or how to handle a press conference — one of the most irrelevant skills that you’ll find before a career in high-end corporate PR.

While it may not be deliberate, this is a horrible misrepresentation of the industry as a whole and is leading students down a dark, dark path. The reason behind the failure at the educational level is simple: Many of these teachers are either not active practitioners, or others are fundamentally not good at major parts of the current world of PR. It’s easy to become obsolete if you’re teaching but not practicing.

After some research, I’ve come up with what I believe are the core elements that need to be applied to just about every PR curriculum. They are: Read More→

In this post, I’m going to share with you the tools you can use to optimize and share your social media and PR images. I use most of these tools myself, so I can vouch for how easy they are to use. Others were recommended by my team members. Which ones are you already using or plan to use?

In a previous post, we talked about the different factors that form your overall online reputation.
In this post, let’s talk about the actual tools you can use to monitor how your online reputation is doing.

By using these tools regularly — daily in fact — you’ll know:

what PR, branding and marketing strategies are working

what your prospects and clients are saying about you and your competitors online

what makes up the current discourse about your market or industry

Think of these tools as your way of keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of your industry.

Public relations professionals need to keep our finger on the pulse of the media. But with so many changes happening, and the speed with which information travels, it’s hard to keep up.

Fortunately for us, Vocus, maker of cloud-based marketing and PR software, puts out an annual State of the Media Report. These reports give a summary of big changes that took place in media in the previous year, as well as trends to look out for in the year ahead. The 2012 report is now available for download, for free, here.

One of the best ways to keep abreast of any expertise is to populate your RSS reader with feeds from high-quality blogs.

Below, I share the 10 blogs I think would be most helpful to PR professionals or business owners who do their own PR.

I culled this list from AdAge Digital’s Power 150 blogs, a ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs. Each blog is scored depending on quality of content, as well as how frequently the posts are shared in various social networks.

In this part of the book, you will read about Maria Perez’s experience in tweeting as a brand. Author Sarah Skerik then summarizes her top tips for using key social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You’ll definitely find a few gems you can implement right away.

Here is the table of contents for Part 4 of “Unlocking Social Media for PR”:

Riding the Social Media Journey

The final part (part four) in this eBook series takes a closer look at the social media journey of Maria Perez in her role as the voice of @ProfNet, Maria shares her experiences and lessons learned as she carefully built a brand on Twitter – and mastered the difference between professional and personal tweeting. The eBook concludes with the author’s, Sarah Skerik’s, thoughtful recap and key takeaways from her ongoing journey through social media.

Need something specific?

Disclosure

Please assume that I have a material connection with some of the products/services mentioned on my blog. That means that I may receive a commission if you purchase through my link. While I only recommend what I truly believe in, please do you own research to decide if a purchase is best for you. Thank you!